The Peak of Poo

The introduction to 'Build a Chair from Bulls%$t.'

Author’s note: Except for the book’s afterword, all the writing is complete for “Make a Chair from Bulls%$t.” As always, the most difficult part of writing the book is nailing the first chapter (and the last). I’ve taken several swings at writing the book’s introduction this month, and below is the one I didn’t delete. I can’t say if this will make it to print. It’s not terrible.

A terribly sterile render of the chair I built (nine times) for the book.

The summit of our city’s dump, which locals call “Rumpke Mountain,” looms some 1,075 feet above sea level and is the highest point in Hamilton County, Ohio. It’s taller than all the seven hills surrounding Cincinnati, which has a lot of ups and downs.

For many, this landmass of litter, this mountain of muck, this horn of hog scraps stands as a symbol of our throwaway society. We buy oodles of cheap things, and when we grow slightly bored with them, we drag them to the curb to be cast into a cordillera of drek that refuses to decompose.

But there’s another way to regard Rumpke Mountain: In a hundred years or so it might be a source of raw materials for future generations to mine after we run out of petroleum, methane and nice socks.

Or there’s option three: we can see this manmade crap-covered crag as both scourge and resource. Because (and this is important) Rumpke Mountain isn’t going anywhere.

The same could be said for big-box home improvement centers. On the one hand, these stockholder-powered steamrollers decimated a long list of small businesses: mom-and-pop hardware stores, independent millwork shops, lumberyards, nurseries and tool rental outlets.

Home centers also poisoned the U.S. market for tool manufacturing. Their focus on price instead of quality is one of the big reasons most tools are now made overseas. And that a high percentage of those tools suck.

But, on the other hand, home centers have democratized the world of raw materials. How? Here’s a short list:

• Anyone can shop there, whether they’re a licensed contractor or a young mom. No one will ever question your right to buy things there – or just loiter and ponder.

• All the products, from 2x12s to tool handles, can be picked up individually and examined by customers. You can pick through a pile of 100 boards to find the lone example that is free of knots, splits and twists. That behavior is prohibited at many lumberyards, and it will get you mocked or shunned at other yards.

• The array of raw materials at a home center is stunning. This allows you to use materials from one department (6x6 cottonwood beams from landscaping) in surprising ways (legs for a workbench).

• You can easily return stuff. If you buy a drill and it is not up to the task (that is, the drill didn’t break – it just wasn’t powerful enough), you can return it with no questions asked.

• Home centers are open late. Most lumberyards and professional tool stores close by 6 p.m. And few are open on Sunday. In contrast, some home centers are open 24 hours. And most of them are open late enough that you can visit after you put the kids to bed. Almost all home centers have Sunday hours.

• Home centers have ridiculous sales at times, especially on tools. I wait until Christmastime every year to stock up on table saw blades (they always offer a two-blade pack for the price of one blade).

So, you can despise home centers for everything they’ve ruined. But – like Rumpke Mountain – they aren’t going away. And so you can also use them and their avarice to your advantage.

Well, that’s what I tell myself every time I pull into the parking lot of my local Lowe’s.

“Feast your eyes upon me, y’all, because I’m a rebel. I’m a tenon-trimming revolutionary who is turning the tools of the oppressor against itself. I am a guerrilla of glue.”

Truth is, the home center is my only option at times. And that’s the case for most Americans. In fact, you have to be incredibly not-lazy (or not-poor) to avoid home centers at least some of the time. So like most people, I regularly saunter into my local home center with my revolutionary tail between my legs.

I shop there, but I have no desire to help home centers make more money. But as I wander their aisles there is something else that I think about during almost every visit: Maybe this place could help new woodworkers.

You probably know this already, but one of the biggest barriers that new chairmakers face is finding good materials and the tools they need to build a chair.

So stay with me here for a moment.

Arm detail from one of the bulls%$t chairs during the waxing process.

I’ve been building and studying folk chairs since 2003. And if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that the people who made these chairs used whatever was on hand. These chairs were built using sticks cut from a hedge, legs from the firewood pile and a seat that was pilfered from a forest owned by a local lord.

You might think that chairs made from crap materials look like crap. (Garbage in, garbage out.) And to be honest, some do. But many of them don’t. In fact, some of these folk chairs – made from materials most furniture shops would burn – are so beautiful that they keep me up at night.

That fact got me wondering: Can you build a comfortable and beautiful chair using basic tools and humble materials found at a home center?

The answer is “yes.” Tool handles can become legs. Dowels become sticks/spindles. And arms and seats can be made from bits of construction material that are typically thrown away or burned on a job site.

Here is how we’re going to do it.

The most important aspect of the chair in this book is that it can be built without jigs, hard-to-find materials or specialty chairmaking tools. All the weird angles in the chair have been rendered into simplicity using a method that I call “sandwich drilling.” I didn’t invent this drilling process. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that chairmakers used the technique for centuries. It’s just kinda been lost.

What is sandwich drilling? Here’s what it looks like. You clamp the arm piece to the seat piece. You place the drill bit where the template tells you. You tilt the drill bit 10° and bore through both the arm and seat. Because they are drilled simultaneously, they will be at the same angle and will line up at assembly.

(Yes, there is some complexity behind the scenes to design a chair that uses this process, but after making a chair or two using this method, it will become obvious via osmosis.)

The arm of the chair is made from home-center plywood. Because of this, you don’t need to steam-bend the arm piece. You simply cut out the plywood, and the overlapping plies inside of it will make your arm as strong as if it were solid wood.

The chairs offer ample sitting room.

The comfort of this chair comes from its wide seat, the geometry of the backrest and the tilt of the seat. You’ve probably noticed that the seat is flat and not scooped out, like many Windsor chairs. Seat-scooping tools are one of the big barriers to making chairs. It’s hard to find good tools, and learning to use them takes time. A scooped-out seat is a little more comfortable than a flat one. But the tilt of the seat and backrest are more important to the chair’s comfort than the shape of the seat (in my experience).

Also, people sit on flat stools all day without complaint. But if you want to add some comfort, make a cushion or buy a sheepskin – that’s what our ancestors did.

The overall look of the chair is intended to appeal to contemporary and traditional tastes. Its design is “broadly British,” though some of its lightness comes from American Windsor chairs. The silhouette of the chair is cribbed from antiques, but its lines are clean enough to fit into a contemporary apartment. The chair has a bit of a formal look because of the number of sticks, but that formality is balanced by the lightness of its parts.

You might be wondering about the chair’s joinery. Is it a compromise because of the materials or the tools? Not at all. The joints in this chair are better than 100 percent of the manufactured chairs I’ve seen, and they’re as good as the joints in many of the handmade chairs out there. That means tight mortises and tenons, wedges, pegs, glue and some natural tension in the parts.

This chair is designed to outlast you. Which is more than I can say about most of today’s flatpack furniture.

Which brings us back to Rumpke Mountain.